~ An Antipodean View on Classical Greece, Rome & the Mediterranean.

Plebs: the sitcom

I kid you not! From The Independent newspaper — a six part sitcom called Plebs will air on British TV next year (northern Spring). When I first saw the headline I immediately thought of those so-rubbish-they’re-almost-good British 1970s shows like Bless This House, Are You Being Served?, or On The Busses (no, that one’s just plain rubbish), but apparently not:

The much-loved classicist Mary Beard continues to conquer the airwaves, this time as an advisor on Plebs, a new sitcom set in Ancient Rome.

They are comparing it The Inbetweeners (in togas), which doesn’t help me as I’ve never seen that show (just its ads, which were unappealing to me), but here’s a more useful (for me, anyway) log line:

“The idea was to make the historical setting by-the-by and root it in modern concerns. We wanted to stay away from the clichés of camp silliness or austere classical actors,” says [the writer] … “Tonally, it’s much more Seinfeld than Up Pompeii.”

2 thoughts on “Plebs: the sitcom”

Oh, yeah, well, Seinfeld. We’ll have episodes where the pater familias, lets call him Ierimius for comic effect, is disturbed that his upstairs neighbour, Nouushominius, had subtly insulted his household lares with inappropriate sneezing during the sacrifice, causing Ierimius to have to pay for a lustrum, and then spending the rest of the episode figuring out a way to make Nouushominius pay the money back (cue a pot of gold), or at least, to have the knave show some shame in public about it.